Boat rentals more good news for city, river

Katie Stepp has a good idea — even if it is not exactly an original idea. She proposes to bring a boat livery back to Port Huron to rent out, initially at least, a couple of pontoon boats from Desmond Marine downtown on the Black River.

"There's a lot of water around us and I don’t think people take advantage of it enough,” she told Liz Shepard.

Fifty years ago, the Port Huron area and every town along the St. Clair River and lakes Huron and St. Clair had boat liveries. Probably none of them rented vessels as nice as the pontoon boats that Stepp is offering. Most of them, for most of the year, did a brisk business in small fishing boats.

That business collapsed and never recovered from Gov. William G. Milliken’s April 1970 order banning sport fishing in Lake St. Clair because of dangerous mercury contamination in walleye and perch. No fishing meant no boat rentals. Milliken lifted the ban about six weeks later, but the imposition of catch-and-release only regulations for the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River and consumption restrictions elsewhere didn’t save the boat liveries.

So, yes, it is logical that the Maritime Capital of the Great Lakes should have boat rentals available to those who want to enjoy our blue waters but can’t afford to or don’t want to own a boat. But it also is a measure of how the St. Clair River and the local environment has turned around since those frightening days.

It also is a reminder that we need to continue fighting for environmental regulations and enforcement that will keep that from happening again. Banning fishing in Lake St. Clair was a national scandal on a par with the Flint water crisis. We must not allow it to happen again.

We have pure waters and a place to rent boats to go along with freighters passing close enough to touch and the drama of icebreakers battling winter. We are still missing a few things that might go along with the Maritime Capital of the Great Lakes.

Loading and unloading freighters at Port Huron’s Seaway Terminal probably isn’t going to happen again. St. Clair County ports do offload important amounts of coal — for DTE power plants — and aggregates, so we can hold onto that part of the title.

We aren’t seeing cruise ships, though.

While Ontario cities have formed the cruise ship coalition — supported by a $250,000 provincial tourism grant — to protect the market they’ve cornered, Michigan and the Blue Water Area continue to watch those ships pass it by.

Our Canadian neighbors expect the Great Lakes cruising industry to quadruple in the next few years. Maybe some will wash up here.